Re: bug in sha1sum

[Philip Rowlands]

On Mon, 12 May 2008, Dave Hines wrote:

> I have just been looking at the man page for sha1sum, and saw the options:
>
>       -b, --binary
>              read in binary mode
>
>       -t, --text
>              read in text mode (default)
>
> There is no further explanation of what these options mean.

Coreutils manpages tend to be short reference sheets listing the 
available options. Further documentation is provided in the "info" 
command, as should be mentioned as the end of each manpage.

 From the docs:
`-b'
`--binary'
     Treat each input file as binary, by reading it in binary mode and
     outputting a `*' flag.  This is the inverse of `--text'.  On
     systems like GNU that do not distinguish between binary and text
     files, this option merely flags each input file as binary: the MD5
     checksum is unaffected.  This option is the default on systems
     like MS-DOS that distinguish between binary and text files, except
     for reading standard input when standard input is a terminal.

`-t'
`--text'
     Treat each input file as text, by reading it in text mode and
     outputting a ` ' flag.  This is the inverse of `--binary'.  This
     option is the default on systems like GNU that do not distinguish
     between binary and text files.  On other systems, it is the
     default for reading standard input when standard input is a
     terminal.


Cheers,
Phil